Providers, such as wireless network service providers or facilities, e.g. office buildings, museums, retail stores, or factories, may provide location services that use, for example, beacons and/or receivers to identify the location of users. But the current fragmented nature of location service provided by different providers hinders the complete realization of these devices' potential. While individual providers or facilities may provide beacons and/or receivers to identify the location of users, the sharing of this information is limited to the network of the provider or facility. In a single navigation, travel, or browsing experience, a user may travel through multiple networks provided or operated by different providers or facilities (e.g., by walking). This fragmentation prevents other providers or facilities from providing targeted information based on the user's current location. These deficiencies also prevent users from receiving location-specific information based on their movement and/or actions over the networks of multiple providers or facilities.
Further, because providers or facilities offering location services are limited to the geographic extent of their network, they receive only fragmentary information about previous user locations. For example, existing systems may not be able to monitor whether a user has previously been in in one facility or in another facility. Existing systems may also fail to merge data from surrounding merchants, so the location of a user with respect to surrounding merchants may be undefined. Consequently, surrounding merchants cannot offer directions to their stores or other facilities.
The smaller size and individualized nature of these fragmentary systems also weights against efforts to combine such systems with other data sources regarding customer or visitor behavior. Furthermore, development of tools for exploiting this location information may be hindered by the inconvenient need to use multiple applications specific to individual providers or facilities.
A need therefore exists for methods and systems configured to provide users and individual providers access to location information from multiple different providers. This location information should be provided in some instances through an open API accessible to users, providers, facilities, and others. The API should typically also combine multiple sources of information to provide a more comprehensive picture of users' interests and behavior and be implemented using an application suitable for use with a mobile device.